“Anxiety reveals the Nothing,” he observed—his italics. Heidegger distinguished between fear, which has a definite object, and anxiety, a vague sense of not being at home in the world. What, in our anxious states, are we afraid of? Nothing! Our existence issues from the abyss of nothingness and ends in the nothingness of death. Thus the intellectual encounter each of us has with nothingness is suffused with the dread of our own impending nonbeing.
